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You already know that Season 2 of Poker Face is coming to Peacock on May 8th! And now we have the full trailer!! Maybe the trailer shows a bit too much. You don’t have to watch it if you already know. But! This trailer reveals the most comprehensive list of guest stars we have so far! Giancarlo Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, John Cho, Melanie Lynskey, GaTa, Haley Joel Osment, Adrienne C. Moore, Patti Harrison, Awkwafina, B.J. Novak, Carol Kane, Katie Holmes, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Cynthia Erivo, David Alan Grier, Taylor Schilling, David Krumholtz, Ego Nwodim, Gaby Hoffmann, Sam Richardson, Geraldine Viswanathan, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Ritter, John Mulaney, Alia Shawkat, Justin Theroux, Kathrine Narducci, Kevin Corrigan, Lili Taylor, Margo Martindale, Melanie Lynskey, Corey Hawkins, Natasha Leggero, Rhea Perlman, Lauren Tom, Simon Helberg, Sherry Cola, Simon Rex, and Richard Kind. And at least one of the Please Don’t Destroy boys. This is fantastic. This is how you do a “howcatchem,” in the style of Columbo. Columbo was packed to the gills with guest stars. Johnny Cash was on Columbo. Faye Dunaway was on Columbo. Janet Leigh was on Columbo. Dick Van Dyke was on Columbo. John Cassavettes was on Columbo. Anyway, you get the picture. I’m over the moon. As CrimeReads contributor Justin Hairston said to me after seeing the Poker Face Season 2 trailer, “we are so back.” Indeed… we are SO back. No bullshit. View the full article

When I was in college, my roommate lent me a book, A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami. He knew I loved noir and thought I’d also love this postmodern Japanese mystery. I did not. In fact, I threw the book across the room (Sorry, Raj). Yes, it started out in a very hardboiled style with a scarred narrator searching for a missing person, er, sheep (or maybe both). Weird, wonderful. But by the end, the mystery wasn’t really solved, not in any satisfactory way. Sure, I knew more about the sheep and the missing friend, but I also knew less. I felt tricked. I had expected something different, perhaps some feeling of mastery or order that we get when most mysteries are resolved. I picked up the book and read it again, angry. I have read it many times since. I was tricked! I love that trick. Since then, I’ve come to seek out books that I call Unresolved Mysteries, stories that borrow from the detective genres, then go a little crazy without ever tying things up in neat bows. My novel The Fact Checker follows a magazine-nitpicker-turned-hapless-detective through a series of misadventures concerning secret eating clubs, anarchist parties, and cultish farms. It owes a lot to these off-kilter detective stories. It even has a mysterious sheep (Thanks, Haruki). Perhaps I like these books because, in life, mysteries don’t begin and end with who-done-it. Everything worthwhile is a mystery, and nothing is ever resolved. Books don’t have to be “postmodern” to remind us of this. Noir has always been pointing to the strange unknowables lurking in the everyday. Raymond Chandler, for one, filled his novels with as many descriptions of furniture and buildings as he did of clues. Are they clues? (Yes!) I often think of a moment in The Lady in the Lake. Philip Marlowe is watching the house of a doctor who happens to live across the street from a suspect. The doctor is not yet a suspect himself, but Marlowe can’t help but watch his every move: “He was on the telephone now, not talking, holding it to his ear, smoking and waiting. Then he leaned forward as you do when the voice comes back, listened, hung up and wrote something on a pad in front of him. Then a heavy book with yellow sides appeared on his desk and he opened it just about in the middle. While he was doing this he gave one quick look out of the window, straight at the Chrysler.” Marlowe thinks there is something suspicious about him, but what? Suddenly he switches tone: “Doctors make many phone calls, talk to many people. Doctors look out of their front windows, doctors frown, doctors show nervousness, doctors have things on their mind and show the strain. Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.” It’s a strange moment: Chandler’s plot-driven surveillance swerves into metaphysical empathy. Then he moves back: “But there was something about the way this one behaved that intrigued me. I looked at my watch, decided it was time to get something to eat, lit another cigarette and didn’t move.” Is surveillance just a form of being nosy? In other words, is it like reading a detective story? Finally, is the real mystery: What are other people? I’ve put together a list of Unresolved Mystery books that ask that question in different ways. What are other people? A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami A divorced advertising copywriter and his girlfriend with magical ears set off to Hokkaido in search of a missing sheep and the narrator’s Bohemian best friend. Stuff blows up. Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen A psychiatrist believes that his wife has been replaced by an exact replica whom he calls the simulacrum. He also indulges in a meteorological conspiracy theory related to the Doppler effect which sends him on a quixotic quest to Argentina while his wife searches for him. It’s a brilliantly funny, tender, and strange portrait of knowing and unknowing, of intimacy and its limits. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal the premise of this book which is laid out in the first chapter, but if you don’t want to know it, stop reading here and start the book. The beginning is amazing! The narrator is on a date at the apartment of a married woman – her young son is sleeping in the next room – when she dies in his arms. The rest of the novel is an obsessive surveillance of the dead woman’s family. If you have not read Marías, whose sentences unfold in erudite stream-of-consciousness, qualifying, defining, redefining, and circling back on themselves, this is a good place to start. It’s like a really suspicious Proust stuck inside a thriller. Riverman by Ben McGrath In the only nonfiction book on this list, McGrath befriends a vagabond canoeist on the Hudson River. When authorities find his canoe overturned (but no body) in North Carolina, McGrath investigates. He traces the life and wanderings of Dick Conant, a charismatic eccentric, and all the people he met on his watery way. While we never really solve the riddle of Conant, we get a portrait, alternately heartening and disturbing, of America and its castoffs. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark “Remember you must die.” This is the message that a mysterious voice delivers to a variety of old people in Spark’s crazy 1959 novel. An inspector is on the case, but for what? The message is true! But, as the inspector says toward the end “If you look for one thing… you frequently find another.” Here we find sociological insight, a comedy of manners, and death. Death is everywhere. A Separation by Katie Kitamura After the narrator’s estranged husband disappears, she travels to a Greek island to track him down, or, rather, to wait for him. She doesn’t do much tracking. Instead, the narrator muses, in cool, cutting tones, on the forest fires and class resentment around her and her missing man. She feels the chasm between them: “between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained.” In the end, nothing is fully explained. “All deaths,” the narrator tells us, “are unresolved.” The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler This one is a totally resolved mystery. Marlowe gets his man, or actually that man is randomly shot by the military, we think. Meanwhile, the women who keep masquerading as other women are all sorted out. One corpse is revealed to be another corpse while a second corpse is the first corpse. Wait. What? *** View the full article

Living on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive in 1973, there were more than a few shops in the community where chattering kids bought all types of cavity inducing treats. My favorite spot was Jesus’ Candy Store, where the Hispanic owner and his wife watched over us kids as though they were our surrogate parents. Jesus’ place overflowed with toys, school supplies, Spalding rubber balls, comic books, chips for Skully tops and, of course, candy. However, Jesus didn’t unlock his door until the afternoon, leaving the morning trade wide open. In the summer of 1973 a new shop opened on Broadway owned and run by an overweight brother man named Jesse Powell. His store was minimalistic in comparison to Jesus’, but he opened at 7 AM. Weighing about 300 pounds, Jesse sat on a strong stool behind the counter. Nailed to the wall behind him was an album cover, but many years passed before I realized that it was the cover to his album It’s Party Time With Jesse Powell (1962). In the photo he wore a suit, his hair conked and sharp as a tack. Jesse had once been semi-famous saxophone player who had toured with Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie before giving it up to open a sweet shop on Sugar Hill. From where he sat, Jesse could see downtown traffic moving steadily as kids played. Sometimes Jesse’s wife Maxine was in the store helping. She was a tall, friendly woman with long blonde hair who had hippy vibes. Jesse was obviously years older than Maxine, and the couple had a son and a daughter. My homeboy and former next-door neighbor Darryl Lawson recalls Jesse’s car was usually parked in front of the store. “When he got in that Cadillac, it just leaned over to the side,” Lawson laughed. In the mornings, on my way to St. Catherine’s grammar school three blocks away, the store would be packed with school children stocking up on sweets that had to last the day. Rowdy kids from my 4th grade class would be buying Now & Later, Mary Jane, Charms Blow Pops, Fun Dips and other brands that they buried in their book bags to sneak eat during class. A few friends were into sports, and they bought stacks of baseball, football and basketball cards that were produced by the Topps Company out of Brooklyn. For those too young to remember, Wacky Packages was a back in the day craze – irreverent stickers mocking commercial products in the same way MAD magazine parodied popular culture. The Wacky parodies included Weakies Cereal (Breakfast of Chumps), Liptorn Soup, Jail-O (Sing-Sing’s Favorite Desert) and many others. The creator of Wacky Packages was underground comic artist and illustrator Art Spiegelman, who introduced them to the company in 1967. “It was printed cardboard with a gummed back,” artist Jay Lynch, who too contributed to the product, wrote in a 2016 issue of Comic Book Creator. “The kids would punch out the product images and lick the back to stick’em on stuff. But the Wacky Packs didn’t really take off big until the early ‘70s, when Topp’s began printing them on peel-back-pressure-sensitized sticker paper.” Spiegelman came of age in the EC era when publisher William Gaines launched the infamous humor comic. Almost two decades later Spiegelman made history as the first comic book artist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the graphic novel Maus in 1992. He also edited the cutting edge graphic arts magazine RAW with his wife Françoise Mouly. “As a child, Spiegelman was obsessed with MAD magazine and its founding editor, cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman,” Arie Kaplan wrote in “MAD Maus,” an essay in the Jewish Review of Books. “It is easy to look at (Harvey) Kurtzman’s early MAD and see cheap, disposable children’s entertainment. But MAD was the holy grail of subversive kid lit for the generation that came of age during the 1950s and 1960s.” Artists Jack Davis and Wally Wood, both former EC cartoonists, also contributed to Wacky Packages. Later, Kaplan quoted Spiegelman’s memoir essay in MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic: “My Topps Bubblegum job consisted of feeding back my MAD lessons to another generation in the form of Wacky Packages… sometimes illustrated by the same artists—my childhood idols!—that Kurtzman collaborated with at MAD.” Selling for five-cents the Wacky Packys (as we called them above 145th Street) soon became a city-wide sensation that included news reports and a cover story in New York magazine, a goofy tongue-in-cheek feature that was as informative as it was condescending. Wacky Packs: New Fad for the Children of the Skeptical Seventies was published on October 1, 1973 and basically attributed the stickers’ success to cynical children living through the age of Watergate hearings and hating everything their parents loved (and respected). Personally I liked them simply because they were funny as hell. Released the same year as the offbeat DC comic horror Plop!, which was also inspired by MAD, sick humor was in and kids loved it. According to Jay Lynch’s article “The Wacky Pack Men,” they worked out of an office located in the Brooklyn Navy Yards with a team that consisted of future underground and strip artist Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), writer Stan Hart (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In) and illustrator Norman Saunders, who did the final paintings from Lynch and Spiegelman’s layouts. Saunders was a respected artist who had painted hundreds of pulp magazine and paperback covers. He’d also been the artist been Topp’s popular Mars Attack in 1960. * One Saturday afternoon my stepfather Carlos stopped by the apartment to drop off a color TV for our living-room. My brother and I got him to agree to take us to the store for candy. When we walked into Jesse’s shop, he and Daddy glanced at one another and erupted in a joyful noise. The two men screamed each other’s name and shook hands. “What you doing over this way Carl?” Daddy laughed. “My wife lives around the corner. Just came over here to get the kids some candy.” “These your boys?” Jesse asked. “Sure are,” Daddy replied. Though he’d been in America for decades, his Puerto Rican accent was thicker than Guava slices. “Show Mr. Jesse what you want.” Me and little bro Perky both pointed to the Wacky red box inside the glass counter. Daddy bought us five each, which made us kid rich, our pockets bulging with stickers. After Jesse found out that he knew my father, he was a bit nicer to me and baby brother, sliding us an extra Wacky Package whenever we bought a few. However, two incidents occurred that soon put an end to my visits to Jesse’s. The first was his purchase of a mean Doberman Pinscher that he kept behind the counter. Perhaps someone tried to rob the store or the dog was supposed to be a deterrent for criminals, but that canine scared me to death. The other happened at St. Catherine where a crew of upper classmen went crazy and stuck Wacky Package stickers on their desks, on the walls and the lunchroom tables. I’m sure the school’s custodian Mr. Cafiero must’ve blown his top which led to Principal Sister Mary Riley banning the product completely. “Anyone seen with these Packys will be suspended for three days,” she said. Evidently the Wacky fad faded, and though the Topps Company continued to make the product for decades, most of kids I knew stopped buying them. These days there exists a large collectors market with fans selling rolls of stickers and unopened packages online. View the full article

“Wow, it was a page-turner.” “I stayed up all night reading it.” “No idea what would happen—I couldn’t put it down!” Comments about my recent thriller? Well, possibly, but in fact, these were reactions to my memoir about my experience founding Comedy Central (Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor, Ulysses Press, 2022). There are no chase scenes, no shootouts, just people in a television company undertaking a big project. It doesn’t sound very thrilling, so how did I get it to read like a thriller? And why would I want to? Telling stories about our experiences is what most of us do all the time. Now and then the story falls so flat that someone comments sarcastically, “Good story…” When standing in front of a group telling a story, we want our audience to listen attentively, so we embellish, use humor, gesticulate, and act the whole thing out in our attempt to engage the listeners. Writing creative non-fiction requires skilled storytelling techniques as well. It’s not enough to give “just the facts, ma’am.” Below are five techniques found in fiction that I use to hold my readers in my creative non-fiction writing. 1. Use Cliffhangers If you’re anything like me, you find it convenient to read until the end of a section before you put the book aside. But if you absolutely need to know what happens next, you turn the page. Keeping the reader turning pages is a must for thriller writers and I’ve found it’s also a great technique for non-fiction. In Constant Comedy, many chapters end with being told an all-comedy channel would never work, or that something has gone wrong and we’d have to shut the channel down, or just that things weren’t going well, as in the chapter ending below: “When Dom didn’t laugh at my joke, I flushed, not out of embarrassment, but from a sense of dread. Something was bound to go wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. I was about to find out.” 2. Find Interesting Ways to Describe Your Feelings When I’m writing a memoir, my first draft is often full of lazy descriptions of how I was feeling: I felt terrible, I felt lonely, I was frustrated. So instead of leaving those, I try and integrate clues about my feelings into the scene. I’m a big believer in using dialog in both fiction and non-fiction. So, for example, instead of writing that I felt miserable, I might have someone say, “Man, you look so miserable I just want to give you a hug.” 3. Avoid Exposition Nothing slows a story down like long passages of exposition, so I avoid it. Of course, there are times, like when you are setting a scene, when you just want to get the critical information out of the way. While there are ways to make exposition interesting, remember that creative writing class chestnut, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s a guideline rather than a rule, but whether you are writing a thriller or a memoir, it’s worth keeping in mind. 4. Make Every Scene Interesting I keep a copy of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Good Writing” taped to the wall above my desk. Rule number 10 is my favorite: “Leave Out the Parts That Readers Tend to Skip.” My own corollary to this rule is, “Find a way to make every scene or description you write interesting.” In a thriller, that means eliminating long stretches where not much is happening and instead making sure the action ramps up before your reader has the urge to skip ahead. When I write memoir, if some of what I’ve written is putting me to sleep, I make sure to go back and liven it up somehow. I start with a checklist of things to add, including dialog, humor, and using metaphors and similes. If nothing seems to help, I consider cutting the section altogether. 5. Raise the Stakes One lesson in storytelling that I learned when I did improvisational comedy was that it was every performer’s job to raise the stakes. Consider an improvised sketch that begins with a husband scrambling to find his wallet. That’s a relatable setup, but not all that interesting. If the improvisor playing his wife raises the stakes by saying, “Honey, just so you know, I put our winning lottery ticket in your wallet for safekeeping,” the scene had added depth, possibility, and dramatic tension. Continually raising the stakes makes the sketch more interesting and, hopefully, presents more comic opportunities. In mysteries and thrillers, what’s at stake is often a matter of life and death, and action, chase scenes, and gunplay all keep the reader immersed in the story. Of course, not all of us experience those things in real life, so our creative non-fiction needs to find ways to make the stakes seem high. In Constant Comedy, I often reminded the reader what was at stake for me: my job, career, self-esteem, and the fear of colossal failure; I endeavored to make those stakes resonate by pointing out that I had a mortgage and a family, so losing my job would be a catastrophe, and failure wouldn’t enhance my resume if I needed to find a new job. So, make sure whatever’s at stake, even if it’s not life and death, is sufficiently amped up. I know I said five techniques, but here’s a sixth. Surprise! 6. Secrets, Surprises, and Twists. Readers love secrets, surprises, and twists in their mysteries and thrillers, and these are also very satisfying in creative non-fiction. When writing memoir, think about what information you can withhold in such a way that, when revealed, might make the reader jump. Often this is something that you were surprised by, like a bequest from a wealthy distant family member you’d never met, or running into an old boyfriend you thought had moved abroad. Secrets, surprises, and twists sometimes show up in real life. Identifying them as such when writing non-fiction can help you to structure a more captivating story. This gives you an idea of the tools I use to make my creative non-fiction writing as exciting as a thriller. Keep them in mind the next time you sit down to write. Your readers will love you for it. *** View the full article

I drank the high school English teacher and college lit prof Kool-Aid from jump. Never mind the glitzy-gauze then circus bigtop film adaptations. This was the great American Novel. One term paper and I was done with it and frankly neither the story nor its Minnesota author had anything in common with me but Princeton and his exposé thereof, This Side of Paradise. Likewise, paeons to F. Scott Fitzgerald from my mystery idols didn’t find much purchase with me as I began my own writing journey. “He was a dream writer and my master,” gushed hard-ass Ross McDonald. Great. “It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite,” opined Raymond Chandler. So? “Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald,” mused my man Chester Himes. Cool. And indeed, to a drunk Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett—about as anti-West Egg and Tom Buchanan oligarch as one could get—scolded, “Why don’t you go back to bullying Fitzgerald? Too bad he doesn’t know how good he is. The best.” Interesting, but is he one of you? One of “us?” But then came Hoya professor and Fitzgerald scholar Maureen Corrigan’s book And So We Read On, How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (note the play on Nick Carraway’s hopeless words at the novel’s end). And recently, Lisa Levy’s essay here in Crimereads. These critical flexes put me on my heels. Is The Great Gatsby a literary Tootsie-Pop…a crime story buried in the Great American Novel? Well, Levy says it’s all noir, citing Laura Lippmann’s definition wherein “Dreamers become schemers.” Levy even dips a toe into my genre, quoting a character from HBO’s “The Wire” speaking to real-life crime master Richard Price (playing a prison lit teacher): “Gatsby, he did what he did. Because he wasn’t ready to get real with the story, shit caught up to him.” Hell, look at Gatsby’s killer Wilson and his wife Myrtle, scheming and hustling in Queens, home of the ash heaps and landfills as Dr. Echelberger peers on, unblinking. “Fitzgerald’s writing might be soft-scrambled rather than hardboiled, but the argument for a reading of Gatsby as noir is complex and compelling.” Sure, Corrigan’s deeper dive illuminated themes of the deception and destructive self-delusion. Yet evidence of Gatsby’s crime pedigree was common sense: “Fitzgerald chose to make Gatsby a gangster.” Moreover, the man’s very name “Gat” was slang for gun and remains so for a nine-millie in some communities. The obscure 1949 film adaption based on George Cukor’s 1925 stage version has Alan Ladd in full film noir trenchcoat gear, his crew in tow, toting a smoking Tommy Gun…with Daisy filling the femme fatale trope. No accident, as this was how the story was perceived a century ago: a Jazz Age patina encrusting a bit of domestic suspense or telenovela longing, fakery, rage, lust making people do base things. Indeed, Corrigan shows how, in addition to The Curious Case of Benjiman Button, Fitzgerald published mystery and proto-psychological thriller short fiction, pre-Gatsby and even pre-Princeton as a sort of warm-up to novel-crafting. Case closed? Not quite. Okay, the novel’s a Tootsie-Roll, I’ll admit—yet what was truly the chewy center and what was candy? I began to look at Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s stylized, slightly sterilized selfie of that moment in America, his true “echo” of the “Jazz Age.” And that moment wasn’t about flappers, flivvers, gin and orgies. No wonder writers like Hammett and Himes could also find co-sanguinity. Instead, the “patina” was the Roaring Twenties idyl, masking the bigotry, want and violence of the times. The “reality” as teased by Corrigan was that this man was laundering gangster blood money through the allegorically phony bond market (poor Nick’s chosen Wall Street hustle). He was a handsome vanilla front, a homunculus, an artifice beyond “James Gatz” …floating above the blood and bullets on the street until a bullet claimed him. “Whiteboy Rick” with a better wardrobe. Michael Fassbender in Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor; Bendini Lambert & Lock in Grisham’s The Firm. Wolfsheim, with his dental cufflinks, is real-life Arnold Rothstein viewed through Fitzgerald’s soft filter. Beneath the Tom Buchanans and even the Midwestern Fitzgeralds were huddled masses of immigrants who bore as parasites Rothstein’s mentors Jack Zelig and Kid Twist. Rothstein built on their legacy to invent a hedge fund form of mobstering: laundering money earned from thuggery—heroin and opium, gambling, brothels, hijacking—through legit enterprises with a return-on-investment. With Prohibition the model went super-nova. Rothstein’s bloodthirsty contractors were “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, “Lepke” Burkhalter, Johnny Torrio; his eager proteges were Meyer Lansky, Benny Siegel. And he mentored Lansky’s young Italian friends—boys named Luciano, Costello, Capone. He taught them how to dress and how to topple the old-world farts who’d been his clients—Masseria, Maranzano, Colosimo. All this while innocent Italian immigrants endured slums and abuse: lynchings in New Orleans, hatred as exemplified by the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Yet was Wolfsheim more diabolical than Dan Cody, the young Gatz’s first mentor? Cody gouged copper from the bowels of West. Yes, on the backs of miners and the poor like young Gatz’s own family, on the land of exterminated indigenous people, or where Mexican mestizos were expelled, abused, lynched… …and speaking of lynching, what of the inventors of Jazz? During the First World War, Gatsby/Fitzgerald was stationed in the brutal Jim Crow South, from which huge numbers of black families were escaping in the Great Migration north. This Jazz Age witnessed thousands of Klansmen marching proudly down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. This Jazz Age suffered murderous race riots, from the South to Chicago and Indianapolis. It was Rosewood, it was Tulsa. It was thousands of men, women and children forced into chain gangs or peonage servitude. Lynched, raped, even burned at the stake for attempting to vote, for a reckless look. And yet the suffering begat blackfolk’s musical gift to a nation that shunned or reviled them. Just so Gatsby could bait Daisy with parties. A soundtrack to excess, murder and graft. Indeed, Arnold Rothstein bankrolled countervailing black criminals of Gatsby’s Jazz Age Harlem: Madame Stephanie St. Clair and her teenage enforcer Bumpy Johnson, or Caspar Holstein, the Bolito King. Outside of West and East Egg, most people didn’t have the luxury of dreams. Only survival. For the ones who morphed into thugs, mob bankers, murders, swindlers—their schemes begat hustles, violence or peddled flesh, weed, blow, heroin, booze…and now fentanyl, pills, crypto-grifts. Who says crime doesn’t pay…so long as it allows you to dream, for it’s means to make those dreams come true. The only difference between Gatsby and such bad folk— expounded on through Fitzgerald’s poetry—is that Gatsby’s dream was the antecedent to the ugliness of the times, rather than the product. Aspiration, packaged in Daisy, was his obsession, not the trappings or tools. He could have had Tom Buchanan wacked in a drive-by at the Yale Club. He didn’t. His dream was deeper, and he died for it. The English teachers and the lit profs weren’t deceiving us—they merely got us tangled up in studying the dream. Accordingly, this literary Tootsie-Pop is not a crime story chewy center surrounded by the candied Great American Novel. Just the opposite. Fitzgerald wrote the Great American Novel…and buried in another American construct. A crime story. I’m convinced… *** View the full article

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. Arlie Wynne hoped that starting over at a new university in Ocean Grove, California would give her a quiet, uneventful life after the chaos she left behind at UCLA. She’s stayed off social media and resisted cyberstalking anyone from her past life. She’s kept her focus on her homework and her waitressing job. So it just isn’t fair when the groom at the worst bachelor party ever turns out to be her ex. And although she’s often wished him dead, she finds herself trying, and failing to save his life. She’s made all the smart choices, lately, and now she’s the one accused of murder. Twice. Preferring to rely only on herself, she’s reluctant to accept help. But there’s the handsome nepo baby who joined in her failed CPR attempts, along with his charming marine biologist grandmother. And the large, grumpy librarian who, apparently, considers finding a murderer to be just another reference question. Since constantly adapting to fit in has only led to trouble, maybe she should finally listen to her own instincts about who to trust and when to speak out. But with a murderer on the loose, is now really the time to stay and fight, or should she just move on to the next new town? SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. Nora Fox: More of a Marilla character, Nora is slow and thoughtful to Arlie’s quick to action and judgment. She is exactly who she appears to be, and doesn’t hide her opinions. Arlie needs Nora’s help to find the true killer, but she chafes at Nora’s structure and refusal to jump to conclusions. Nora’s past has led her to value security, predictability, knowledge, and comfort. She is willing to fight for justice, but she will only act as a last resort. She prefers to use her intellect and her connections with others to assist in the fight. Dan White: The murderer, has waited in the wings his whole life. Stepping in to his father’s job of financial advisor and overall life manager for the Doring family, he is sure his loyalty will eventually be repaid and his lifelong love of Barb Doring reciprocated. After all, he deserves it. But when Barb’s son Chet announces he is getting married, entitling him to the remainder of the family trust, Dan’s dreams are in danger. When he realizes a simple tweak to a bachelor party prank could save his job and allow him to play hero, he decides to finally take action. His murder plot is successful, but no one is reacting the way he imagined. Barb is doting on a newcomer and has no time for him. Chet’s fiancée is making demands and bringing unwanted attention to what should be private matters. That pesky librarian and the outsider he had hoped to pin Chet’s murder on are poking around where they don’t belong. And family secrets being revealed means he needs to kill again to secure his future with Barb. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). Ask Me Anything Don’t Ask I would love to find something better! FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Read this NWOE article on comparables then return here. Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why? The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jessie Q. Sutanto Both of these authors write modern cozy-adjacent mysteries with a cast of diverse characters who become found family. Amateur sleuths combine their skills to provide justice when the regular channels fail. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication. Hoping to escape the drama of her recent past by moving to a new university in a quiet beach town, a young woman finds even more trouble when she is accused of killing her ex-boyfriend and another person she’d tried to forget, and must learn to trust her own instincts about others to save herself. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Conflict: A Navy brat who has lived all over the world, Arlie is great at reading the room and fitting in. Sometimes too well, so she’s not sure anymore who she is versus who she has adapted herself to be. The one time she let her true self shine through, calling out her frat-boy boyfriend for his potentially criminal treatment of young women, she is shunned on social media and in person. Determined to blend in and just get through her classes at her new school, she avoids attention and getting close to anyone, until she’s back in the spotlight and accused of murdering the very same ex she had hoped would die. Arlie bristles when she sees injustice, but she has promised herself she wouldn’t get involved in anything that wasn’t hers to do. Scene: Working her part-time job as a waitress, Arlie finds herself dealing with the frat-boy types she knew all to well at a bachelor party at the golf club bar. Listening to the crude jokes about the bride and enduring lude comments, she sucks it up and puts on a glowing smile instead of delivering the punch in the nose she knows they deserve. That never ends well. When the groom ends up being her ex, she wants to scream but doesn’t react, except to spill a glass of water on him. And when he falls to the ground with convulsions, she knows she can’t just watch. Her dad taught her to step up, so she has to try to save even his worthless life. When he dies anyway, Arlie wonders why she bothers and longs to crawl back into her dorm room bed. But when she’s accused of killing him, she knows she has to fight, no matter what the consequences. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? Lyle Rowan was the only other person at the bachelor party to step up and try to save Chet. He is charming and funny, and Arlie finds herself attracted to him. But she doesn’t trust her own instincts or anyone else, especially a handsome, charming, rich guy. The push and pull of Arlie’s feelings and inability to trust cause tension and conflict throughout the story, especially when Lyle could also be the murderer. Here are some of Arlie’s thoughts: Sure, this guy Lyle jumped in to help with CPR when no one else would. But he’s a nepo baby with a bad reputation, and grew up with Chet. Why should he be any different? He’s handsome and charming, and he knows it. Okay, he has spent his time learning to be a top-notch nature photographer instead of partying all the time like Chet. But he’s left two powerful women, an Oscar-nominated actress and a tennis player who beat Serina, at the altar. But he’s polite to his grandmother and fed me rather than griped when I was starving. He seems like he might actually be a nice guy. But I thought that about Chet once upon a time, didn’t I? Or did I just think he was fun and exciting? And that being seen with him would get me access to the best parties in LA? I saw the pecking order at UCLA and made my choice. I was as attracted to the glamour and the instant circle of “friends” in the top sororities as the next college freshman. I lightened my hair and scoured the internet for the right dresses and jewelry before I even landed in LA. So who was I to judge? Aunt Linda was always good at knocking some sense into me when my desire to fit in got bigger than my sense of right and wrong, but she’s gone. And I certainly can’t trust myself, let alone anyone else. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it. Ocean Grove, California looks like Mayberry on the beach. A tiny, quiet town nestled between Monterey and Carmel, few people even realize it exists, and just think it’s another neighborhood in Monterey if they think about it at all. But for centuries, there has been more going on here than meets the eye. Women have held roles from mayor to architect. And when they couldn’t wield direct power, they formed the Society of Helpful and Enquiring Women to get things done more discreetly. Tourists come to walk the gorgeous coastal trail and admire the charming bungalows, but most never realize the intricate structure of women supporting truth and justice that hold the town together. Ocean Grove Public Library has a reference desk like most public libraries, with the “Ask Me Anything” sign. But no other library has Nora Wolfe sitting like a queen on her throne, answering any question a patron dares to ask. Lost children have been found, cheating husbands exposed, and murders solved, at this desk. Except for the never-ending line at the reference desk, the library is quietly bustling like most small libraries. The large windows that overlook the bay in the reading room attract students and retirees. Story times and local history lectures are regularly scheduled. But Arlie quickly realizes that, more than any other library she’s been to, this is a place where she belongs. Nora’s home, aka the Society Clubhouse is a solid craftsman bungalow two blocks from the library. Owned by SHREW, the comfortable living and dining rooms on the first floor are where members meet. Filled with decades of well-build hand-me-down furniture centered around the huge tiled fireplace, these rooms contain photos of past members, books they’ve written, and memorabilia of member successes. Mitzi, Nora’s wife, reigns over the kitchen, providing food for meetings along with meals for the customers lucky enough to be on her weekly food delivery list. Mitzi is the best chef in town, but you have to be willing to eat what she’s in the mood to make. Nora and Mitzi live on the second floor, behind the bright red door few are invited to pass beyond. The third floor is available, according to Society charter, to those in need, for as long as that need exists. This is where Arlie ends up when she is unable to return to her dorm, in a cozy attic bedroom with a window seat that has peeks of the bay. Isla’s Shell House is Lyle’s grandmother’s house. Isla, a marine biologist who worked with Jacque Cousteau when she was younger, had it built for her on the coast in Cobble Beach by an architect friend in the 1960s. Small but perfectly designed for its environment, every room has a view of the ocean, and no space is wasted. When Arlie gets a chance to stay the night in the Pearl Room, she never wants to leave. Presidio University is the small university in Ocean Grove where Arlie enrolls after leaving UCLA. It is where her Aunt Linda went to college, and the reason her aunt brought her to Ocean Grove every summer. It is located at the top of the hill, furthest away from the ocean you can get in Ocean Grove, in the Grove part of town. Nestled high in the trees, PU is a world unto itself, where few students bother to venture into the rest of the quiet town. Due to her last minute decision to transfer, Arlie is stuck in a triple dorm room in one of the oldest dorms, on a floor full of freshman. As a transfer junior, she feels older than her years and overwhelmed by the chaotic energy of 18-year-olds on their own for the first time. Her roommates, best friends from Turlock, thinks she’s strange even before she’s accused of murder, and the college grapevine makes it impossible for Arlie to stay on campus once Chet is killed. Various Local Restaurants: Since most of the local restaurants are owned by one conglomerate and Arlie only works part-time, she is sent to various restaurants for her shifts, each with different vibes and staff expectations. La Rue is quiet and French. Shenanigans, the golf bar, is rowdy and loud. Arlie’s skills at reading a room and adapting enable her to work at both, and other restaurants, without a thought. And getting to know staff gives her insight from locals that she otherwise wouldn’t have. The Coastal Trails through Ocean Grove and Cobble Beach are Arlie’s escape. She can run for miles, get away from the dorm drama, and hold onto her memories of her many visits here with her Aunt Linda. Often the trails are bustling with tourists and bicyclists, but early in the morning or late at night, she can have them to herself, except for the occasional sea lion or pelican.

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A bullet on the music charts can make a recording career—“number seven with a bullet!” A bullet in the chamber of an assassin’s gun can cost a young man his dreams of a career in the music business. A bullet scooped up from a homemade target range can bring a killer to justice. Late on the evening of March 9, 1989, Kevin Hughes, twenty-three, chart director at Cash Box magazine (a music industry trade publication competing with Billboard), was hanging out with Sammy Sadler, a recording artist and promoter associated with Evergreen Records. They were leaving the Evergreen offices just before 10:30 when a man dressed in black stepped from the shadows and opened fire. Sadler was settling into Hughes’s car when he took the first round in the arm and shoulder. Hughes fled south on 16th Avenue, but two bullets in the back brought him down. The shooter left Sadler wounded but alive and hobbled to where Hughes lay, fired two rounds into the back of his victim’s head, and disappeared into the shadows. Initial speculation about the murder ranged from a mugging gone wrong to a hit to protect some dark music business secret. The dark secret scenario came closest to the truth. Kevin Hughes was an honest man with a passion for the business of music, particularly for the metrics that go into creating chart rankings. He was responsible for receiving airplay information from radio stations and using that raw data to create the weekly charts. While other chart sources were making the move to computers, Cash Box continued to build charts essentially by hand, which opened the process to abuse. Chart fixing schemes took place in a variety of ways, but in a typical scenario, a starstruck country music wannabe (actual talent optional) would pay several thousand dollars to an individual to record and promote a song to radio stations. The producer/promoter would then pay personnel at some payola-friendly stations to exaggerate the number of times a song played in a given airplay reporting period, during which they might not have been spinning the record at all. Exaggerated reports landed songs on charts such as Cash Box’s Country Music Independent Chart even though nobody was playing or hearing them. When Kevin Hughes recognized that the charts he managed weren’t agreeing with his research, he began to take action. He dropped several of the stations he suspected were making false reports. This threatened to remove songs from chart positions already bought and paid for. Then, when it seemed Hughes was considering blowing the whistle on a scheme raking in significant under-the-table dollars, he was murdered on Nashville’s 16th Avenue South, part of famous Music Row. In March 1989, I’d been living in Nashville for eight years. I came to town to write songs and pursue a recording career. I arrived in the company of—and under a ten-year contract to—an amateur, possibly shady manager. He soon hooked us up with a guy who offered me a recording and publishing deal. Within a year, this Nashville guy maneuvered me out of the binding management contract and into five-year contracts with him. We recorded two albums’ worth of my music, in 1982 and 1984, neither of which saw the light of day. When my five-year contract expired, I walked away from that situation but not from Nashville, spending the next few years continuing to write songs, playing in bands, and working a succession of jobs (retail clerk at Cat’s Records, cleaner of swimming pools, driver of the equipment truck for a country music star, and staff songwriter for a couple of other small music publishing companies). To my knowledge I was never directly caught up in the kind of scheme Kevin Hughes threatened to expose at Cash Box, but I suspect my producer/publisher worked close to that dark edge. Still, I was thrilled to live in Music City. During my time there one of my regular activities was walking 16th and 17th Avenues—Music Row—and imagining all the music and deals taking place in the Row’s record label offices, recording studios, and publishing houses. I think it more than likely that one of these walks took me by the Cash Box offices where Kevin Hughes worked. I might have even passed him on the sidewalk or stood behind him in line at the International Market near Belmont College, which we both briefly attended (but not at the same time). When I began writing my thriller, Streets of Nashville, more than thirty years later, the story I had in mind wasn’t that of a murdered young Cash Box chart director. Yet that death still haunted me. The novel begins with a fictionalized account of the attack on Hughes and Sadler. Then, fifteen days later, gunfire echoes again along the Row when four people are shot—three fatally. Tenderfoot songwriter Ezra MacRae—out on the town to celebrate the first good fortune he’s had with his songs—witnesses the triple homicide. But the masked gunman spares him. Why? My more mature reflections on that time shone a new light on the events of March 1989. Nashville was on the knife edge of uncertainty. As the digital age loomed, changes to Music Row’s traditional business practices—legal and illegal—were imminent. Crime was skyrocketing, even on the hallowed Row, where sidewalks began to fill with strangers—transients and tourists and starry-eyed hopefuls with guitars on their backs. The old facades of “Music City, U.S.A.” and “Athens of the South” cracked as Nashville exploded. By the time the 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes was solved, Nashville had become home to the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, the NHL’s Nashville Predators, and almost a quarter million more residents. In 2002, Nashville detectives working the Kevin Hughes cold case received a tip that destroyed the thirteen-year-old alibi of Richard F. “Tony” D’Antonio, who had been Cash Box’s chart director before Hughes. Investigators were led to a backyard target range where the ground was littered with years’ worth of bullets and casings. The informant had sold a .38 caliber handgun to D’Antonio the afternoon of the Hughes murder and promised to provide the alibi. A Nashville detective took a single scoop of bullet fragments to the lab and was shocked that within twenty-four hours one wadcutter bullet was determined to be a perfect match for those taken from Hughes’s body thirteen years before. While D’Antonio was finally convicted of the murder in 2003, however, he was believed to be only the executioner. Allegedly Chuck Dixon, record promoter and Cash Box executive, was the one who wanted Hughes dead for threatening his lucrative chart fixing revenue stream. But Dixon could not be tried, as he’d died of cirrhosis of the liver in December 2001. In January 1990, ten months after that fateful March, Robert Stack narrated the investigation and reenactment for Unsolved Mysteries. One of the interviewees was none other than Chuck Dixon, believed to be ultimately responsible for the death of Kevin Hughes. In a segment showing him sitting with crossed legs in a black leather armchair, he says of Hughes’s position as Cash Box chart director, “It’s a lot of work, and in my tenure as a promoter, I’ve been through probably twelve, fifteen, maybe even more chart directors. And [Hughes] was probably, overall, not only the best but the most fair.” Yet outside the minds of Dixon and D’Antonio, nothing was fair about that murder on Music Row. *** View the full article

I wish I could remember when I first read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time—I must have been around twenty—but I certainly remember how much I loved it, which has only grown with every reread. I had already become a serious reader of crime fiction, immersed in the works of contemporary crime writers in addition to the usual Golden Age suspects like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, I simply could not comprehend how a mystery writer had produced a book like The Daughter of Time, one perfectly attuned to my love of research, that upended traditional historical wisdom without devolving into outright conspiracy theory. One that featured a wonderful array of supporting characters who only entered a single room to pay court to an ailing detective recovering from a broken leg, bedridden and confined to that space. Imagine how it felt when readers first encountered The Daughter of Time in its year of publication, 1951. Detective fiction had certainly already bent traditional structures in all sorts of directions, whether through satire (think E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, published in 1913), narrative misdirection (Agatha Christie’s still hotly debated 1926 Poirot tale, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), tone (the hard-boiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Dorothy B. Hughes’s In A Lonely Place)—or by jettisoning order out of chaos altogether (any kind of noir, starting with James M. Cain’s 1934 debut, The Postman Always Rings Twice.) The genius of her fiction…is how well [it] explore[s] the ideas of narrative falsity and hidden truths, and the distance between the author and her characters. But a novel like this? Where the detective, Alan Grant, is desperately bored, in need of something to occupy his brain because he can’t go out into the world to do his actual job? Where a question that haunted Britain for centuries—did Richard III really kill his two young nephews, the princes in the tower, in a single-minded late-fifteenth century quest for power?—is actually, credibly solved? The Daughter of Time was a mystery novel like no other before, though plenty since have copied its irresistible structure: rather than a locked-room mystery in which the murder is an impossible crime, the detective is in (and becomes) the locked room, using cerebral means to reason his way into a solution to a genuine historical conundrum. It is, as the author Robert Barnard wrote, “an unrepeatable success,” one that has garnered innumerable accolades since its publication. Some of those accolades: Anthony Boucher, in his Criminals at Large column for The New York Times, deemed the book “one of the permanent classics in the detective field…one of the best, not of the year, but of all time.” Dorothy B. Hughes, in her capacity as a critic, called it “not only one of the most important mysteries of the year, but of all years of mystery.” The Crime Writers’ Association in the UK named The Daughter of Time its number one choice in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time (1990), and Mystery Writers of America ranked the novel fourth in its own similar compendium in 1995. If I ever get around to formulating my own Top 100 list, The Daughter of Time will rank near the top—not only for quality, but for the sheer number of times I’ve reread it in the quarter-century since my initial discovery. Why do I keep going back? For the wondrous rush of tagging along as a centuries-dormant mystery is revived again, but also the prospect of unspooling another mystery at the novel’s heart: one about the author herself. * Let’s start with Josephine Tey’s name, which she adopted later in life. Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952), born and raised in Inverness, Scotland, took it from her great-great-grandmother (her mother was also named Josephine). Tey was not MacKintosh’s first pseudonym, nor the best-known during her lifetime; each name she took on carved out a different identity wholly separate from her initial self as Elizabeth, or Beth. As Gordon Daviot, she wrote historical novels, short stories, poems, and radio dramas beginning in 1925, but her true calling was in playwriting. Her debut play, Richard of Bordeaux (1932), starring a young John Gielgud and a West End theater staple for the next two years, made Daviot famous—and it wasn’t exactly a secret that Daviot was a woman, whose face was sometimes advertised and who went about freely among friends under that name. Still, the Daviot pseudonym kept Beth MacKintosh deliberately under wraps. Daviot was all about performance; Beth stayed most of the year in Inverness caring for her ailing mother, and then, after her death, keeping house for her father. This hadn’t been her original intention, of course—she’d left Inverness in 1914, at the age of eighteen, to work as a physical education teacher (an experience she would mine for the 1946 standalone Miss Pym Disposes). But the outbreak of World War I, losing an early love to the battlefield, and a powerful sense of duty brought Beth back to her hometown, to which she would stay rooted for the rest of her life. Sequestered in Inverness, Beth still found a way to realize her writerly dreams, first as Daviot, and later as Josephine Tey. The latter pseudonym first emerged in 1936 with the publication of A Shilling for Candles—a follow-up to The Man in the Queue (1929), originally published as Daviot—but did not become her preferred publishing moniker for another decade, one which saw Beth visit her theater friends and peers in London, subsuming herself in a social whirl before returning to Scotland, where parental care and work—and a strong sense of privacy—took precedence. This sense of compartmentalization is what drove Beth to invent her mystery-writing pseudonym. Tey could publish novels and stay out of the publicity fray, merely offering up an author photo (or not) and scant biographical details to readers chiefly interested in the books. Daviot, by contrast, grew under pressure to become more of a public figure thanks to the demands of the stage. This made her something of a slippery figure, in conversation with but set apart from her crime-writing contemporaries. Readers would have to be content with judging the works, and Beth, as Tey, made certain that these works would include carefully plotted narratives, evocative settings, and diamond-precise prose. Consider the opening of The Daughter of Time, which sets matters up immediately and reveals Inspector Grant’s state of mind: Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood: theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it. This paragraph lands with even more force after the pandemic year of 2020, when much of the world was shut inside, involuntarily educated on every facet, nook, and cranny of their living space. But anyone cloistered in convalescence will recognize the sense of tedium, the need to do something, anything, with one’s mind when all the usual methods have long since curdled, as a universal one. Even for those who had not encountered Inspector Grant in his prior outings—particularly his brief appearance in The Franchise Affair (1948) and To Love and Be Wise (1950), this paragraph makes clear this is a person worth spending significant readerly time with. Thankfully, Grant’s friend, the actress Marta Hallard, lands upon a brilliant suggestion: if everything in the present is boring, why not venture deep into the past? A vexing historical mystery ought to do, and Grant lands on the story of the two Princes in the Tower, allegedly confined to the Tower of London in 1483 after the death of their father, King Edward IV and subsequently murdered by their uncle, Richard III, who soon ascended the throne—and made infamous for his supposed villainy in Shakespeare’s play more than a century later. Grant is surprised at his own investment in solving the long-ago mystery, but “it did simplify things when you were just a policeman with a game leg and a concussed spine hunting up some information on dead and gone royalties to keep yourself from going crazy.” He even enlists a research assistant of sorts, the American academic and British Museum employee Brent Carradine, who is soon caught up in proving Richard III’s innocence as much as Grant is. Together, the two men not only explore what they believe didn’t happen—that the Princes were killed during Richard’s reign—but also how history is constructed, propagated, bent, and stretched and sanded over so much that lies eventually become presented as truth. And Grant, so long a convalescent, confesses that he is finally “feeling like a policeman. I’m thinking like a policeman. I’m asking myself the question that every policeman asks in every case of murder: who benefits?” The Daughter of Time takes hidden truths to a new level, one infused with a sense of post-modern fun. Far too many of the history books he reads can be dismissed with the epithet “Tonypandy,” Grant’s word for the kind of historical confabulations that accrue over time. History is a milieu that Grant, even after he goes through his investigation and lands on his theory of what really happened, can never fully comprehend. So, he would “go back to [Scotland] Yard, where murderers were murderers and what went for Cox went equally for Box.” That is Grant’s thinking. But is it Tey’s? Hardly so. The genius of her fiction, particularly the run of novels beginning with Miss Pym Disposes and ending with The Singing Sands, published a few months after her death in 1952, is how well they explore the ideas of narrative falsity and hidden truths, and the distance between the author and her characters. The barrister’s dogged pursuit of what he believes to be a false rape claim in The Franchise Affair (1948) would sit uncomfortably today if there wasn’t the nagging sense that Tey herself is toying with the reader, inviting them to identify a little too closely with the barrister and not enough with the girl. Tey slyly reinvents the story of Martin Guerre, one of impostors and those who wish to believe in them, even when it leads to murder, in Brat Farrar (1949) while in To Love and Be Wise (1950), she explores the concept of gender fluidity with such subtlety and care that it serves as a potential clue to why the male-coded Daviot pseudonym was so important to her. The Daughter of Time takes hidden truths to a new level, one infused with a sense of post-modern fun. As Tey’s biographer Jennifer Morag Henderson reveals in her exemplary 2015 biography, Grant knows about Richard III in the first place “because he saw Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux (four times).” Marta Hallard grows anxious at the lack of new work from a playwright “concentrating on her detective fiction.” Topics like Mary Queen of Scots and the Covenanters—subjects of a play and biography, respectively, by Daviot—are also discussed. There is a sadder hidden truth as well: Tey wrote and published The Daughter of Time when she was becoming ill with cancer, a fact she revealed to almost no one at the time—leading to the shock of her friends and fans at her death on February 13, 1952. It was a life cut short, denying readers the more exemplary work Tey undoubtedly would have written had she lived longer. But the work we do have, and particularly The Daughter of Time, shows a writer in deep communion with what she thought and how she thought about it. That is the truest gift Josephine Tey continues to give readers old and new, and what a delight is in order for those about to experience her voice and style for the very first time, as I did a quarter-century ago. __________________________________ Excerpted from Sarah Weinman’s forward to The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Forward Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Weinman. Copyright © 1951 by Elizabeth MacKintosh. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. View the full article

It is a truism that children imitate. You do what you see. If I had grown up the child of an electrician, possibly I would be rewiring something right now, rather than writing this essay, but as the child of a mystery writer… here I am. My mom is Paula Gosling, who published 15 mysteries during her career, both series with returning detectives and stand-alone novels. She was pretty successful, she won the Gold Dagger (the British Crime Writers Association’s top award), the John Creasey award for best first crime novel, and one of her books was turned into not one, but two absolutely terrible movies. (Fair Game, featuring Cindy Crawford and Cobra, a cult classic with Sylvester Stallone, which featured an axe-wielding biker gang that I can assure you was NOWHERE in the novel). She worked for thirty years and retired quite happily, having supported us with her work, and ready to hang up her keyboard. She says she ran out of things to say. However, while her career success was pleasing and interesting to watch, that’s not where her main influence lay. The first and most important thing I learned was that writing is a job, one that you do every day, more or less, and that it’s hard. Fun, sure. Rewarding, occasionally. But hard. And that if you’re a writer you’re going to write whether you like it or not, and maybe you’ll get lucky and get published, but it’s not guaranteed. And that secondly, if you’re a crime writer, you’re a bit bananas. A weirdo, albeit gently. Let me be clear. My mother was, and is, a sweet and charming woman. However, she and her crime writing friends tended to look at the world as a constant, teeming pond of potential murder and violence. I would often find her sitting with the newspaper, gazing into space, because the brief overview of a recent death had sent her into a reverie of speculation. Why was the fishmonger found in the library? Why were there chopsticks in his pocket? And why were his hands so clean? It wasn’t even that she especially liked murder, or violence, she wrote ‘cozies’ because she was pretty squeamish actually, but she was…deeply interested. She would watch people talking to each other and narrow her eyes. Possibly they were planning a hit. She made friends with policemen whenever possible, and asked our doctor about decomposition after he’d checked us for chicken pox. She liked puzzles and weird facts and wore a poison ring (whose little compartment she would demonstrate gleefully). She was…a little strange. Her work also meant, on a practical level, that there were a lot of questionable books in the house, books we had ready access to. Books about forensics. Books about weaponry. Books about autopsies (with pictures, and yes, now I know what someone looks like when they’ve been hit by a train, don’t google it). She loved to research, to get the details right. She essentially retired before the internet became what it is, so everything was at the library, and we spent a lot of time in the children’s section while she requested books that made the librarians look at her strangely. And of course we read mysteries. Our house was full to bursting with books, because along with everything else our Mom was a Book Hoarder. So we read Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout at al, alongside Flat Stanley and the Oz books. It was a childhood filled with wonder, but also with violent, unexpected death. When I started writing novels myself, my first was a mystery. It was dreadful, truly. I believe there were hidden passages and a twist that was foreshadowed from the dedication onwards. Then I wrote a mystery that was better, but in the process realized that plotting a crime and then hiding it, which is essentially the task at hand for a mystery writer, was difficult, and not my strong suit. So I switched, like the lazy candy-ass I am, to what I call domestic fiction: light-hearted novels about real life, about love, about family and children and romance. I wrote what I knew, and I got lucky and got published. But the mystery haunted me, and with every book I published I would ask my editor if we could work on it…and she would kindly say no. My agent concurred: The rom coms, she said, are going great, stick with what’s working. So I did. And then the market changed, as markets will, and Richard Osman’s books came out, and Only Murders in the Building was successful, and suddenly the window for my mystery opened. I went back and completely rewrote it. About fifteen times. I hired a friend of mine, a very successful TV writer, to read it and make suggestions about the plot. It was enormously helpful. I struggled and stuck post cards on a board and tried to make everything fit. Having pushed so hard to be able to write a mystery, I started to question my own sanity. But I remembered my mom. She was unusual, she talked openly about how to get away with murder, but she never quit. She would have long conversations with my step-dad, overheard in the kitchen, in the living room, through their bedroom door, about the plot. He was not a writer, but he would make suggestions, or ask questions, and she would push through and make it all work. I knew it was supposed to be challenging, so I kept going and got as much help as I could. I also stuck with my strengths, creating strong characters first and building the crime around them. Hopefully, it works. After all is said and done, writing crime fiction was clearly something I was predisposed to do, and I have my mom to thank for that. I hope she enjoys my first mystery as much as I enjoyed reading hers. And when I look at my kids, watching me go through this process, I can safely assume they think I’m weird too. It’s ok, it runs in the family. *** View the full article

Much has been written about Villanelle, the mischievous, fashionable millennial murderer at the center of BBC America’s beloved series Killing Eve. Villanelle (Jodie Comer) contains multitudes: she is spunky and surly, mischievous and malicious, sardonic and sentimental. Mostly, though, she’s self-obsessed, in constant pursuit of a lifestyle which affords her the maximum amount of enjoyment. Villanelle is a psychopath, employed as an assassin by an international criminal organization which pays her well—allowing her to have the highly stylish life she wants. But killing people is not only her job, it is also her pleasure; throughout the season, she resembles an assassin less than a serial killer. And her flamboyant, creative murders catch the eye of Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a flustered MI6 agent with whom Villanelle becomes infatuated. As the show progresses, Eve becomes as obsessed with the idea of catching Villanelle as much as Villanelle becomes obsessed with the idea of Eve catching her. Season One plays with a cat-and-mouse template, with Eve chasing Villanelle while Villanelle tries to get as close as possible to Eve without risking capture. The Second season draws the two women together more directly than the first, allows them to have the romantic and sexual relationship teased throughout Season One. Season Three splits the women apart again and shows them each attempting to live lower-profile lives independently, and Season Four offers Villainelle the dangling carrot of moral redemption. But I want to dwell on Season Two for a bit. These women have to work together, it turns out, to handle another female assassin hired by the criminal organization that has by now effectively sacked Villanelle. While the fatigued and stressed Eve has grown accustomed to Villanelle’s histrionics, she is startled to find that the new killer is Villanelle’s antithesis: stealthy, pristine, minimalist, and effectively invisible. For these reasons, Eve’s team nicknames this killer “The Ghost.” And the addition of the Ghost becomes essential in illuminating one of the show’s key practices: dividing all its female characters into two camps—women who stand out in crowds, and women who blend in. This organization is one aspect of Killing Eve’s larger investment in reading female power as directly related to noticeability. The show offers the (sad) determination that women who are the most glamourous also achieve the most power. But beyond this, specifically by arranging Eve and Villanelle as opposites, the show is able to redefine what “glamour” and “visibility” actually derive from—an appreciation of, and instinct to preserve, the self above all else. Villanelle lives in a “chic as shit” Parisian apartment (Eve’s words), owns a giant wardrobe of exquisite clothes, and has endless photoshoot-ready hairstyles. The most fundamental breakdown between the two women in Killing Eve is that Villanelle constantly practices “self-care” while Eve absolutely does not (it might be said that Eve herself, with her sacrificially-intense work ethic, is what’s killing Eve). Killing Eve renders self-care (in all its forms, from skincare routines to wearing beautiful clothes) as a kind of high-stakes gamesmanship—one that ensures attention, which then allows for manipulation, control, and power. Simply, characters who garner the most attention for being put-together and fashionable are the show’s most commanding. One such woman is Eve’s indomitable boss, Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) a steely-eyed, elegant executive who wears unwrinkled blouses and impeccable car coats. When seeing Carolyn one morning before a meeting, Eve blurts out, “How do you always look so good? I mean, do you even sleep?” Without missing a beat, Carolyn offers, in complete deadpan: “It’s my moisturizer. It’s made of pig’s placenta. Costs a fortune, smells like arse, but it is exceedingly effective.” Then she turns and walks away. Like Villanelle, Carolyn values her own aesthetic, enough to use a disgusting, expensive product in order to perfect herself. And Carolyn’s demystification of her beauty routine is additionally a power move—in breaking down how she is able to look so good, she dwells on the product’s qualities that would prevent its mainstream assimilation. Carolyn’s particular visibility is clearly linked to her status, and reminds Eve that Carolyn is above her. The show reveals the (exhausting) labor and complicated measures taken by women to attempt to become their most “glamorous,” but it plays with “glamour” as appearing effortlessly attainable for some while seeming strenuous and obtuse for others—revealing, by these different levels of participation, a cultural reading of power accessibility. True female power, the show interprets, lies in the ability to naturally appear alluring—and this is highly desirable. “I don’t mind smelling like arse,” Eve calls to Carolyn from behind her, after Carolyn describes the moisturizer and walks away. “I’ll send you the link,” says Carolyn casually. When Villanelle is in Amsterdam, relaxing at a table overlooking the water, wearing a light pink shirt tied at her midriff and a sweeping tapestry of a skirt, which she’s paired with a pair of large gold earrings, she is approached by a well-dressed young woman, who tells her she looks amazing. “Can I take a picture of you for my Instagram?” the woman asks Villanelle. “No, of course not,” Villanelle barks, sending the woman away. Extravagant and photogenic as she is, Villanelle dresses for herself, alone. The show features countless shots of her, triumphant after completing a job, carrying designer shopping bags, and trying on her spoils—but these constitute her everyday wear, including what she wears when she’s totally by herself. But it is only by wanting to look spectacular for one’s own satisfaction and pleasure, as Villanelle does, that true glamour, and corresponding power, will grow. Villanelle easily attracts the attention of Aaron Peele (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a suspect she and Eve are surveilling, precisely by negging him—she doesn’t seem to care about him, so he grows obsessed with her approval. In Lit Hub, Rachel Vorona Cote has analyzed Villanelle as a kind of “cool-girl” “Instagram-influencer” personality, but Villanelle rejects the actual promotion of herself—the labor of asking for attention. Her power comes from the fact that she draws attention, seemingly without having to try to be noticed. In this reading about which women have access to power, the show is wise to connect “visibility” beyond simple fashion and a corresponding illusion of effortlessness, to race, class, and accordingly, effort. The women who are not noticed are working women of color, while the women who are noticed, and receive capital for this, are exclusively white and wealthy. The Ghost (Jung Sun den Hollander), like Eve, is Asian. When building a profile on the anonymous killer, Eve suggests, “We’re working on the assumption that this is a woman, late to middle-age, looks like an immigrant worker, so, you, know she’s not white…” Her much-younger colleague Hugo, a white man, cuts her off to ask, “What makes you think that?” Eve responds, “The fact that you just interrupted me, mid-sentence, makes me think that.” Eve’s daily existence as an Asian woman provides insight into the Ghost’s identity—but it also allows her to identify with her slightly. The Ghost, Eve says is “the kind of woman people look at and never see.” They are the “invisible” women in this exclusive world of espionage. Eve is even able to help capture the Ghost through this identification, by speaking near her in Chinese, to form a bond enough for Eve to approach her and chat. Later, to sneak into a high-security home in an emergency, Eve dons a cleaning woman’s uniform and only speaks in Chinese. No one notices her. Moreover, Eve and the Ghost—as well as Eve’s two colleagues, Jess (Nina Sosanya, in Season 2) and Elena (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, in Season 1), who are both black—are singled out among the other women in the show for being practical, responsible, and utterly professional. They use these qualities to gain access to the exclusive spaces inhabited by the other women who have, in turn, gotten there by not playing by the rules. Moreover, these hardworking women (Eve, the Ghost, Jess, and Elena) are all pawns—the women who are seen as glamorous are the ones calling all the shots. Season 2 features a scene in which Carolyn easily manipulates her superior, a frumpy (white) woman behind a desk. Furthermore, the show presents that women who are invisible, even if they are more talented or professional than their glam counterparts, are doomed to fail, or worse, take the fall. Thus, the show makes an essential determination about the nature of “glamour”—that it is nearly impossible for women to become effectively glamorous if they want to be seen that way. Gemma (Emma Pierson), the girly and silly schoolteacher crushing on Eve’s husband Niko (Owen McDonnell), is killed precisely because she tries to be noticed by him—inviting him to stay with her after Niko leaves Eve (who has grown far too obsessed with her scary job for Niko’s preference). Villanelle grows annoyed that Niko, the man loved by Eve, is unfaithful, so she murders Gemma in front of Niko. In the Killing Eve, women who want to captivate others will (literally) die trying. Tech mogul Alistair Peel’s secretary, assassinated by the Ghost, is killed while bleaching her upper lip—a noxious inhalant is blended into the dye and as she breathes, she dies. But the show itself is clear not to judge the women who try to be beautiful, alluring, or desirable (after all, its heroine is one such woman—most notably, in this season, when she purchases a dress specifically because her husband says it would look sexy on her, and then wears it to his work event). Instead, Killing Eve is more than aware that these women live in a kind of patriarchal fishbowl—an environment scrutinized by outside male governance—and how this warps their behavior and psychologies. Season Two gives us not one but two very creepy, objectifying men—Julian (Julian Barratt), the “Good Samaritan” who rescues Villanelle after she escapes from a hospital and allows her to stay with him in his house of a million china dolls, and Aaron Peel, a billionaire tech tycoon who gets sexually aroused by staring at women (and never wants to touch them). Both men want to “take care” of Villanelle—style her (Julian combs her hair, and Aaron gives her a closet of designer clothes), view her, and, later control her body in some manner or other (Julian demands that she pay him back for taking care of her, while Aaron plans to have Villanelle murdered in her sleep, so he can watch). The Male Gaze, the show maintains, is ubiquitous and violent—the only antidote is the bulwark of female self-objectification, which becomes an ultimate source of power, because it then facilitates the effective handling and manipulation of others without the concern of being manipulated, in turn. The sociopath Villanelle loves objects, and starting in season one, she attempts to train Eve into appreciating beautiful things enough to become a beautiful thing, herself—not for Villanelle’s viewing pleasure, but to help Eve grow into the type of woman who thrives in this world. In Season One, she steals her suitcase only to replace its contents with gorgeous garments. In Season Two, she mails Eve a striking tube of lipstick. Though Villanelle is the show’s villain, Killing Eve smartly unites both women (along with a host of others) as universally being victimized by a cultural obsession with appearance—an obsession with being able to appear cool and alluring in front of others, rather than disappear when in plain sight. Killing Eve reads visibility as tragically linked to autonomy—to be seen is to have control over others, and therefore, finally, one’s own life. View the full article